FROM PERSONAL FILE

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, born December 30, 1942 in Belebey, Bashkir ASSR. Russian.
He was arrested in May, 1963 under Article 190-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (dissemination of deliberately false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social structure). On June 1, 1963, he was sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment.
Re-arrested in December 1965 for participation in the preparation of a meeting in defense of Sinyavsky and Daniel. He was again forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital.
He was arrested on January 22, 1967 for organizing a protest demonstration in Moscow. Sentenced on September 1, 1967 under Art. 190.3 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (active participation in group activities violating public order) to three years in a camp.
Arrested on March 29, 1971, by the USSR Council of Ministers’ Department of State Security for Moscow and the Moscow region.
On January 5, 1972 he was convicted by the judicial board for criminal cases of the Moscow City Court under Art. 70(1) of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (anti-social behaviour). On January 5, 1972 the judicial board of the Moscow City Court sentenced him to two years in prison and five years in exile under Article 70 Part 1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (anti-Soviet propaganda). He served his sentence in the Vladimir prison, then in the Perm 35 colony.
On December 18, 1976, he was released from further imprisonment, deprived of Soviet citizenship and exchanged for L. Korvalan, General Secretary of the Chilean Communist Party.
On October 30, 1991 he was rehabilitated by the Resolution of the Presidium of the RSFSR Supreme Court “for the absence of crime in his actions”.

There was a rhyme from the 1970s, in the heyday of stagnation in the Soviet Union. “They exchanged a hooligan for Luis Corvalan…”

“Bully” is Vladimir Bukovsky. A dissident, active distributor and author of Samizdat from the early 1960s. Three times tried. He was kept in psychiatric hospitals, prisons and camps, including Perm-35. He spent a total of 12 years in jail and under compulsory treatment.

Author of several books, including And the Wind Returns, Letters of a Russian Traveler, Build a Castle, many articles and essays.

“Political camps had existed there almost from the very beginning of Soviet power… Of course, such a long neighborhood of camps did not go unnoticed by the locals. Several generations of them worked as overseers… The camps were used to being seen as a feeding trough…Over time, the commercial relationship between the convicts and the guards went so far that literally anything could be done for money. Protests, statements, reports of hunger strikes and arbitrariness passed freely to the outside,” Bukovsky wrote in his book And the Wind Returns.

In 1976, the Soviet authorities exchanged Bukovsky for Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan, after which Bukovsky moved to Cambridge.

He was nominated as a candidate for president of Russia in the 2008 elections, but was not registered. In 2014, the Russian Foreign Ministry denied Bukovsky Russian citizenship.

He died of cardiac arrest in Cambridge on October 27, 2019. Buried in London.

… And the ending of that famous poem about the hooligan sounded even stronger: “Where would I find such a b… to replace Brezhnev?” It was written by Vadim Delaunay, another dissident writer and poet, who took part in the demonstration on Red Square on August 25, 1968, against the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia.